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If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

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Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#141

Post by briandear »

jacquesm wrote: post #95
tracker1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, safety and essential infrastructure should probably not be open source. That said, the main points of infrastructure access and configuration are probably larger issues at hand over the actual systems source itself. As to TFA, I have mixed feelings. I'm actually more concerned about research and related patents and data surrounding publicly funded study. I do feel that Open-Source should be given some level o…

Disagreed, safety and essential infrastructure should definitely be open source. Right now your typical infrastructure project is about as leaky as they come compared to a typical web app. Exposing that stuff to broad daylight will certainly help to harden it.

Except how long does it take to fix a vulnerability in government? If an exploit is discovered, consequences are immediate and the patch to fix it might not be.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#143

Post by GlenTheMachine »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #132
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

> The bigger problem, though, is that much of the US government just isn't technically set up to release software (as opposed to documents). Setting up a git repository, in the DoD, is an utter nightmare. Every single patch has to be pushed through a public release process that can take weeks or months and involves review by as many as ten to fifteen different offices, few if any of which even know anything about sof…

When we do release code, that's more or less how it works.

The issue is that, basically 100% of the time, anything being released to the public has to go through a release process. If you produced it as an employee of one agency (eg the Air Force), but if was paid for by a different agency (eg DARPA), then it also needs to go through a similar release process on the sponsoring agency's side.

Typically, this has to happen for every single “release”. In other words, for the original software, again for every subsequent patch, for the documentation, for every correction or update to the documentation, etc. If you want to give a presentation about it your slides need to be released. If you want to write a paper on it that needs to be released as well.

Evey time through the release process takes two to six weeks, depending.

This works OK if you are releasing documents. Once a document is written, it usually doesn't need hundreds or thousands of updates over it's lifetime. A journal paper gets released once, then it's done. But the same process is what we currently use for software, and software is just a very different thing than a document is.

Imagine what would happen to the release cycle of a small OSS project if it took six weeks for github to get around to posting your update, and if github management rejected about half of them for reasons that were mostly inscrutible to you.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#146

Post by m0zg »

analog31 wrote: post #134
natechols wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at the very least our entire national tax code should be downloadable in machine-readable form.

It should just be a giant function: def foo(**kwargs): return how_much_you_owe

It really should be a provably unambiguous ruleset that would take in the person's circumstances and numbers and spit out a number, yes. I understand that your post is a joke, but that'd be an _awesome_ thing to have for everyone, especially if coupled with some adversarial tech to find and close loopholes. Which is, ironically, why this isn't going to happen.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#147

Post by ausjke »

Let's look at this from a global view, one country's funded software may not be forced to be shared by other countries unless they paid their dues? As code in the public domain is for the whole earth these days.

Yes nations do compete. The whole one-government funded software should be published to internet is _false_, in a technical sense.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#148

Post by [deleted] »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #132
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

> The bigger problem, though, is that much of the US government just isn't technically set up to release software (as opposed to documents). Setting up a git repository, in the DoD, is an utter nightmare. Every single patch has to be pushed through a public release process that can take weeks or months and involves review by as many as ten to fifteen different offices, few if any of which even know anything about sof…

[deleted]

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#149

Post by cls59 »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

Here's a good counter example:

https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/downloads.as...

Back when I did work on hydraulic modeling, HEC-RAS was the gold standard for open channel flow. It is only available as a pre-compiled Windows executable.

I had a ton of parameterized simulations to run and would have loved to have gotten my hands on the source code in order to run it on EC2 Linux spot instances and to mechanize the parameter inputs by cutting the GUI input forms out.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#150

Post by fulldecent2 »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

I am working on this problem and contributing to https://code.mil. This project explains to DoD managers /how/ to set up an open source policy. It's going to be a long process, but we can do this!
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